even saw you, I became whole again and disintegrated as soon as we parted. I observed that you often had a nice-looking little boy with you. I noted that the two of you seemed to compose two-thirds of a happy family.
Many rooms.
Conrad flew off to Amsterdam to buy paintings and commit adultery. Dorothy, the baby-sitter and the babies hummed down to Cornwall in the new mini. This left me alone in the flat. No not quite alone for there was a living cat and a rathermore living painting by a modern English master who paints boneless people. This one showed an amorphous female with a leprous head sprawling on a maroon sofa. Formally, it was a most elegant painting. Mornings, I would wander nude out of my cupboard into the living room and uneasily contemplate the painting.
Why did this man paint this kind of painting? Did it reflect a homosexual’s revulsion from fertile flesh? I had read this interpretation and been unconvinced. My own feeling was that in a welfare world of guilt-free sex Ham painted the spiritual bankruptcy of nuclear man. Nietzsche suggested that our suicidal guilt at having murdered God would compel us, even as we celebrated humanity and devised ever more impressive institutions for human welfare, to construct behind our back the instruments of human destruction. He painted the somnambulist, sybarite workers in the global death factory.
The cat consumed one tin of slimy and perversely inviting meat per day. Every few days I conveyed a tray-full of synthetic litter, designed to receive the animal’s excrement, down to the rubbish bin and refilled the receptacle with pure grains. Unhappily the beast was imperfectly reconciled to its hygienic tray and finally my pledge to Dorothy to keep the flat in order triumphed over my revulsion. Entering the living room one morning and finding the nasal onslaught markedly worse I strode to the suspect sofa and, savouring the buoyancy of conscience that rewards the ultimate facing of a disagreeable reality, I shoved it to one side.
My olfactory instinct had been true. I set to work. The relatively fresh deposits, while offensive to handle, immediately clogging the soft-haired brush I unwisely used, were disposed of rapidly but the ancient crusts, testimony to feline diarrhoea and the remarkable bonding properties of its product with bare wood floors, actually required chiselling off and I crouched, breathing reluctantly, for nearly half an hour with my instrument. I then chivvied the cat out of the front doorand ignored its plaintive whining for readmission. I suffered only faint twinges of remorse and after a few days the cat disappeared entirely.
— O. Hi.
Here in this big, bright city, that’s where you’ve been living? You’ve been living all this time?
— Baby, desolation is the gift I bear you.
Take my hand, mummy. I wish I could fly. He has—jaunty. A cascade of neon letters. As I crossed the road, he swung jauntily out of a cavity in the night, under the blaring red. Wears very jaunty clothing.
— Desolation is the gift I bear you.
Are you learning to live without love?
— I ain’t got no home.
A coil of rooms.
Living in the boot of my car. Shirts get oily. Pitching up Thames Street the other day, saw wheel come off this lorry. Under the sooty brick towers of the gas-works—
— We’re separated. You knew that.
— Baby, in this brand new world I can only give you desolation.
— In this brand new—
— Baby.
Under the sooty brick tower of the gas-works, along a poetic street, came this big spinning wheel. Made straight for this woman. No one else on a half-mile of pavement and the wheel chased her down. Just saw her crumple as the traffic carried me on.
— Baby, it’s clothes—that’s what it’s all about.
— I ain’t got no home.
— Stay here if you want.
So I moved into the basement flat in Mortimer Road. I soon noticed, with mild excitement, that the writer was never at home. He had papered his lavatory with a collage of
Many rooms.
Conrad flew off to Amsterdam to buy paintings and commit adultery. Dorothy, the baby-sitter and the babies hummed down to Cornwall in the new mini. This left me alone in the flat. No not quite alone for there was a living cat and a rathermore living painting by a modern English master who paints boneless people. This one showed an amorphous female with a leprous head sprawling on a maroon sofa. Formally, it was a most elegant painting. Mornings, I would wander nude out of my cupboard into the living room and uneasily contemplate the painting.
Why did this man paint this kind of painting? Did it reflect a homosexual’s revulsion from fertile flesh? I had read this interpretation and been unconvinced. My own feeling was that in a welfare world of guilt-free sex Ham painted the spiritual bankruptcy of nuclear man. Nietzsche suggested that our suicidal guilt at having murdered God would compel us, even as we celebrated humanity and devised ever more impressive institutions for human welfare, to construct behind our back the instruments of human destruction. He painted the somnambulist, sybarite workers in the global death factory.
The cat consumed one tin of slimy and perversely inviting meat per day. Every few days I conveyed a tray-full of synthetic litter, designed to receive the animal’s excrement, down to the rubbish bin and refilled the receptacle with pure grains. Unhappily the beast was imperfectly reconciled to its hygienic tray and finally my pledge to Dorothy to keep the flat in order triumphed over my revulsion. Entering the living room one morning and finding the nasal onslaught markedly worse I strode to the suspect sofa and, savouring the buoyancy of conscience that rewards the ultimate facing of a disagreeable reality, I shoved it to one side.
My olfactory instinct had been true. I set to work. The relatively fresh deposits, while offensive to handle, immediately clogging the soft-haired brush I unwisely used, were disposed of rapidly but the ancient crusts, testimony to feline diarrhoea and the remarkable bonding properties of its product with bare wood floors, actually required chiselling off and I crouched, breathing reluctantly, for nearly half an hour with my instrument. I then chivvied the cat out of the front doorand ignored its plaintive whining for readmission. I suffered only faint twinges of remorse and after a few days the cat disappeared entirely.
— O. Hi.
Here in this big, bright city, that’s where you’ve been living? You’ve been living all this time?
— Baby, desolation is the gift I bear you.
Take my hand, mummy. I wish I could fly. He has—jaunty. A cascade of neon letters. As I crossed the road, he swung jauntily out of a cavity in the night, under the blaring red. Wears very jaunty clothing.
— Desolation is the gift I bear you.
Are you learning to live without love?
— I ain’t got no home.
A coil of rooms.
Living in the boot of my car. Shirts get oily. Pitching up Thames Street the other day, saw wheel come off this lorry. Under the sooty brick towers of the gas-works—
— We’re separated. You knew that.
— Baby, in this brand new world I can only give you desolation.
— In this brand new—
— Baby.
Under the sooty brick tower of the gas-works, along a poetic street, came this big spinning wheel. Made straight for this woman. No one else on a half-mile of pavement and the wheel chased her down. Just saw her crumple as the traffic carried me on.
— Baby, it’s clothes—that’s what it’s all about.
— I ain’t got no home.
— Stay here if you want.
So I moved into the basement flat in Mortimer Road. I soon noticed, with mild excitement, that the writer was never at home. He had papered his lavatory with a collage of
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